Bruce Bennett/Getty ImagesBryce Salvador was able to joke afterwards about taking a puck in the face late in Wednesday's 4-1 win over the Penguins at the Rock.

They left some blood on the Prudential Center ice last night, but the Devils didn't leave much else during their impressive 4-1 victory.

Defenseman Bryce Salvador was hit in the face by a shot from Penguins defenseman Alex Goligoski with 2:13 remaining in the game.

Salvador, who dropped to the ice and then left a trail of blood as he was helped off to the dressing room, apparently suffered no eye damage. The puck struck him in the left cheekbone and he suffered a 10-stitch gash on the left side of his nose, as well as smaller cuts in the outside corner of his left eye and on the bridge of his nose.

He was waiting for the results of X-rays.

"I feel great. We won," Salvador said afterward. "I better get a blocked shot for that, that's all I know."

Although he was in good spirits, Salvador acknowledged that he was in pain. And he was very concerned after being struck.

"This is not the first time I've been hit in the face," he said. "I train myself not to overanalyze things because you just don't know. The important thing is to get off the ice.

"I just wanted to get off the ice. Whenever you're bleeding you want to get off as quickly as possible. I didn't know where I was bleeding from."

Salvador was just one of the reasons the Devils were able to shut down the Penguins.

Unhappy with the way they let Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin embarrass them in Pittsburgh 11 days earlier, the Devils rotated three lines to shut down the league's top two scorers.

With three straight wins and eight in their last nine games, the Devils moved to within two points of the Pens in the Atlantic Division and have three games in hand.

"I thought this game we controlled the puck a lot better. We didn't give Crosby and Malkin the time and space we did in Pittsburgh," said Zach Parise, who scored his 16th goal in the triumph. "We kind of let them freewheel in the last game."